When the Lights Fail
Snow writes silent code,
no-one to read it,
but crows.
Streetlights are editors,
cutting veins,
into cobblestones.
A traffic light hums,
red, amber, green,
a spectral gospel,
an order that’s clean.
Suddenly, raining down
explosions,
shadows,
swallowing the city.
Neon gasps, chokes,
struggles to breathe.
Drones hover in darkness,
frozen in silence,
the city’s skeleton,
stripped to the bone.
Black velvet presses down,
protests swell outside,
no heat, no electricity,
no water,
they cry,
but the regime stands steady,
as young men die.
Rust, cracks, the breath of forgetting.
Power gone but ghosts linger.
Silence gnaws at fears.
Beyond brief flares,
stars break through,
ancient data points, unseen for so long.
A city that forgot to look up,
to dream again.
Fires burn on.
Night’s silence is not final,
earth’s bones still beat,
waiting for dawn,
and all that it will carry.
When I wrote this I went back and forth over whether I should specify Kiev as the city in question, but decided in the end to make it more universal, especially as I've never been to Kiev. Also by doing this I hoped the general theme of civilisation's fragility might come through.